[Image: “Charon,” by user h-k-d (Hartwig HKD) on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license.)]
From whiskey river:
Limbo
Each of them can’t decide if there is a God
or if there is a self.Do I have an I? one says
to another who seems distracted, looking out what might have been a window.What is the difference between a self and a soul?
Is it true that one god is in relationship to each of us?
Or is the each of us an illusion, and we are the god we are looking for?
That’s what the distracted one is thinking and what
she wants to know,and she wishes that other person would stop bothering her,
and she wishes she had more time to think about these things,
although she has all the time in the world.
(Marie Howe [source])
…and:
Les géographies solennelles des limites humaines…
(Paul Eluard, Les Yeux fertiles, p. 42)(“The solemn geographies of human limits”)
Car nous sommes où nous ne sommes pas.
(Pierre-Jean Jouve, Lyrique, p. 59)(“For we are where we are not.”)
But how many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading of Doors! For the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open…
And what of all the doors of mere curiosity, that have tempted being for nothing, for emptiness, for an unknown that is not even imagined?
Is there one of us who hasn’t in his memories a Bluebeard chamber that should not have been opened, even halfway? Or — which is the same thing for a philosophy that believes in the primacy of the imagination — that should not even have been imagined open, or capable of opening half-way?
How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.
But is he who opens a door and he who closes it the same being?
(Gaston Bachelard [source])
